Weather and Climate

Forecasting the weather is important to many areas of the New Mexico economy, including agriculture & forestry, renewable energy, and travel & tourism. With better models, we can improve local forecasts, and better predict extreme events, and assess climate change.

A better understanding of weather and climate requires improved models and better data collection. Improved models need a more in-depth understanding of the physics, while better data will require more observations of both surface and upper air.

Our group is very active in improving weather models through a better understanding of convection and water-cycle processes; increasing the number of surface weather stations and the number of upper air observations is one of our long-term goals.